lovely trinket box made with fabric flowers

i love working with fabrics, bits and scraps of it can be seen lying around my craft area all the time. and whenever i find the time, i would sit down and work on making flowers with these fabrics. its good to practice with spare fabric scraps that you can find lying around. for one, you get to work with different kinds of fabrics and get the hang of how to manage them and secondly you can have a great set of unique handmade flowers to use in your projects. which fabric works well with glue gun and where do you need to use your sewing skills, you get a better understanding of it all.

here i have used a beige colored, silk fabric to cover my round shaped box. now here, i used white pvc glue to stick the fabric onto the box. in my experience, i have found this to be sturdier and longer lasting than glue gun. since the box will be closed and opened repeatedly, the fabric needs to stick for a longer time. another alternative could be fabric glue, which i have found to work very similarly to the pvc glue.




then it was time to make some flowers. i wanted to keep the style a little elegant, so decided to use a bright pink and light yellow color combination for the flowers. yellow to match with the base fabric and pink to add some color.  beginning with the pink flowers, i made those using hot glue gun as i needed to stick the fabric together quickly. this pink one is a stretchable, Lycra based fabric that is a bit hard to handle. hence, you need to work quickly with it so as to keep it in place. i made round rossettes by twisting strips of the fabrics and shaping them in circles. to control size of  the flowers, keep adjusting the length of your strips. i made around 3-4 flowers in 1" , 5 flowers of .5 and 2-3 bud shaped one to fill gaps here and there if required. after the pink, it was yellow flowers. the fabric i used for yellow ones was a soft organza. i started out by cutting pointed petals of 3 different sizes and wrapping each around the other and sewing them together at the bottom. the trick is to sew each petal one after the other until you get a full flower. on an average it took 18-20 petals on a 2" flower and about 10 minutes to make one.

once i had all the flowers ready, had to place them on one side of the lid. i made different arrangements before deciding on the final one. as with any project, you have to use your best judgement when arranging embellishments. just flowers didn't seem enough, so i decided to use a porcelain doll i had lying from another project and stick in the middle. isn't she pretty!
so, once the box was covered completely, i added a row of white half beads. i absolutely adore this combination of using light shades with cream colored beads, not the white ones. somehow, the white beads seem very unnatural to me, weird quirks maybe! arranged them around the flowers in a circular pattern and voila! then to add a bit more color, i put a strip of the same pink fabric as the flowers around the sides of the lid.

have so many fabric pieces lying around with all these ideas buzzing in my head! another great use would be to cover empty wine bottles with them which can make for some very nice gifts too. please do share your ideas of using fabrics! till the next time...